If they can find new sin, can they find new sense?

If they can find new sin, can they find new sense?

A New Catholic Sin: being obscenely wealthy

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor

The Vatican has revised the traditional Catholic Seven Deadly Sins with new ones, including being obscenely wealthy. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, announced the new sins in an interview published on March 10, 2008, in LOsservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. He explained that the old sins (sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, and pride), laid down in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great, are individualistic, whereas the seven new ones are social, affecting others.

The new social mortal sins consist of producing genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy, and taking bad drugs. The Catholic Church classifies sins into less serious venial sins and the graver mortal sins. According to Roman Catholic doctrine, as violation of Gods law, mortal sins result in eternal death if they remain unrepented by the act of confession and penitence. Bishop Girotti explained that the sin of obscene wealth consists of the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.

It is not clear to me why becoming obscenely wealthy was not previously considered a sin, and how new sins can come into being. It seems to me that Gods laws are eternal, never changing, so it is not possible for new sins to be created, even by God. Its possible that there has been a more fundamental moral law on wealth being bad, and that new circumstances have made obscene wealth worse, while previously it was not so bad. But there have been high inequality and extremely wealthy persons, often kings and emperors, in the past, and it is not clear why great wealth would be worse today than in the past. Also, greed was already one of the deadly sins, so there must be something other than greed going on to make wealth a new sin.

This new sin is qualified by the amount of wealth having to be “obscene.” The word “obscene” can mean offensive or repulsive, or else just lewd even if nobody is offended. Since the bishop explained that obscene wealth means excessive accumulation, evidently “obscene wealth” means wealth that people or perhaps Church chiefs consider to be offensive because it is excessive. Then the sin is simply having more wealth than some Church people consider to be OK.

There are two basic ways to apply moral judgments. One is to judge an outcome, and the other is to judge a process. The first way condemns inequality, wealth, or poverty because it exists, regardless of how it came about. The second way judges how it came about. This new Catholic sin applies the first way, judging an outcome regardless of the process of getting there.

The universal ethic applies natural moral law to a process, not an outcome. By the u.e., if one acquires wealth by just means, then the resulting wealth is just, i.e. not evil. By natural moral law, human beings are equal self-owners, and therefore properly own their labor and the wages of labor, so even if labor achieves high wealth, it is not immoral. It does not harm others to accumulate wealth by labor and voluntary exchange, no matter how much wealth is produced.

By natural moral law, theft is immoral, so if wealth is obtained by stealing what belongs to others, then that act or process is evil. Stolen wealth is evil not because the wealth is large but because the act of theft is evil.

Therefore by natural moral law, as expressed by the universal ethic, there is no obscenity in wealth as such, no matter how large. By the u.e., the concept of excessive wealth is meaningless. There is only evil in obtaining wealth by theft.

If we take human equality seriously, then not only are we equally self-owners but also equal owners of the natural heritage, the natural resources provided by nature or God. Theft takes place when one takes more than ones equal share of the benefits of nature, as measured economically by the rent of those resources. Theft is also committed by the pollution that degrades the value of the natural environment. If one uses the term obscene for wealth, then becoming and being obscenely wealthy consists of the theft of others labor, products of labor, contractual obligations, and others equal share of nature, including natural rents and environmental quality.

Unfortunately, Catholic doctrine is not congruent with the universal ethic. However, it can become so. If new sins can be recognized, then doctrine can change again, to recognize that “Thou Shalt Not Steal” applies to others labor and share of nature, and that if there is no theft, there is no sin in having wealth. The Church need only go back to the Ten Commandments and recognize what is theft and what is not theft.

– Fred Foldvary

Copyright 2008 by Fred E. Foldvary. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, which includes but is not limited to facsimile transmission, photocopying, recording, rekeying, or using any information storage or retrieval system, without giving full credit to Fred Foldvary and The Progress Report.

We are Hanno Beck, Lindy Davies, Fred Foldvary, Mike O'Mara, Jeff Smith, and assorted volunteers, all dedicated to bringing you the news and views that make a difference in our species struggle to win justice, prosperity, and eco-librium.

3 Responses to If they can find new sin, can they find new sense?

I wouldnt call it a new sin but more a reminder of what we already know. Excessive wealth is acquired exactly as youve stated – by theft. The catechism is clear that underpaying workers is a sin. The entire United States economy is in a huge mess because of the sin of greed, the powerful at the top taking not just more than their share, but so much more than their share that others can no longer live on a full week salary. Millions of people are no more than indentured servants to the elite class with hidden taxes that benefit only the wealthy and/or powerful. The Church has it right.

Is Monsignor Girotti correct? Absolutely. Americans take entitlement and narcissism to new levels in the last thirty or so years. Society as a whole hasnt fared well by that; most individuals are worse off. Life isnt really about having the most toys, spending 50 years of your life finding yourself or whatever other selfish crap people seem to think will make them happy. Comparatively, Americans are less happy on happiness surveys that even some third world countries. People think having money is having good character – most Americans certainly worship the ethically dubious wealthy as if they were gods. Having a lot of other peoples money is just that, having a lot of other peoples money, generally gotten via some form of screwing someone else out of the labour of their hands. Having good character is having good character. The two concepts seem to be mutually exclusive. Jesus said you cant worship both God and money. He was correct.

“There are two basic ways to apply moral judgments. One is to judge an outcome, and the other is to judge a process. The first way condemns inequality, wealth, or poverty because it exists, regardless of how it came about. The second way judges how it came about. This new Catholic sin applies the first way, judging an outcome regardless of the process of getting there. ” — You make a good point Fred. It is not the wealth itself that is obscene, it is the process by which wealth may have been obtained and accumulated.

Advertise here.

Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

more transformation than reform; it’s a step ahead. Harvard economics students this year did petition to change the curriculum, in the wake of the English who caught the dissension from across The Channel. French reformers, who fault conventional economics for conjuring mathematical models of little empirical relevance and being closed to critical and reflective thought, reject this “autism” – or detachment from reality – and dub their offering “post-autistic economics”. Not a bad name, but again, academics define themselves by what they’re not, not by what they are, unlike geonomists. We track rent – the money we spend on the nature we use – and watch it pull all the other economic indicators in its wake. We see economies as part of the ecosystem, similarly following natural patterns and able to self-regulate more so than allowed, once we quit distorting prices. To align people and planet, we’d replace taxes and subsidies with recovering and sharing rents.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat – or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off – a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.

a discipline that, compared to economics, is as obscure as Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, compared to conventional investment theory, about which Buffett said, “You couldn’t advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.” (The New York Times, Oct 29). The writer wondered, “But why? If it works, why don’t more investors use it?”
Good question. Geonomics works, too. Every place that has used it has prospered while conserving resources. Yet it remains off the radar of many wanna-be reformers. Gradually, tho’, that’s changing. More are becoming aware of what geonomics studies – all the money we spend on the nature we use. Geonomics (1) as an alternative worldview to the anthropocentric, sees human economies as part of the embracing ecosystem with natural feedback loops seeking balance in both systems. (2) As an alternative to worker vs. investor, it sees our need for sites and resources making those who own land into landlords. (3)As an alternative to economics, it tracks the trillions of “rent” as it drives the “housing” bubble and all other indicators. And (4) as an alternative to left or right, it suggests we not tax ourselves then subsidize our favorites but recover and share society’s surplus, paying in land dues and getting back “rent” dividends, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Letting rent go to the wrong pockets wreaks havoc, while redirecting it to everyone would solve our economic ills and the ills downstream from them.
People must learn to stop whining so much and feel enough self-esteem to demand a fair share of rent, society’s surplus, the commonwealth.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old log-gers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat — or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off — a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.

not exactly Georgism, the Single Tax on land value proposed by Henry George. He did, tho’, inspire most of the real-world implementations of the land tax that some jurisdictions enjoy today, and modern thinkers to craft geonomics. While his name and our remedy both begin with “geo” since both words refer to “Earth”, the two have their differences. (a) George pegs land monopoly as the fundamental flaw while geonomics faults Rent retention. (b) To fix the flaw, George was content to use a tax, while geonomics jettisons them in favor of price-like fees. (c) George focused on the taking while geonomics headlines the sharing. George envisioned an enlightened state judiciously spending the collected Rent while geonomics would turn the lion’s share over to the citizens via a dividend. (d) And George, as was everyone in his era, was pro-growth while geonomics sees economies as alive, growing, maturing, and stabilizing. Despite these differences, George should be recognized as great an economist as Euclid was a geometrician.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

a POV that Spain’s president might try. A few blocks from my room in Madrid at a book fair to promote literacy, Sr Zapatero, while giving autographs and high fives to kids, said books are very expensive and he’d see about getting the value added tax on them cut down to zero. (El Pais, June 4; see, politicians can grasp geo-logic.) But why do we raise the cost of any useful product? Why not tax useless products? Even more basic: is being better than a costly tax good enough? Our favorite replacement for any tax is no tax: instead, run government like a business and charge full market value for the permits it issues, such as everything from corporate charters to emission allowances to resource leases. These pieces of paper are immensely valuable, yet now our steward, the state, gives them away for nearly free, absolutely free in some cases. Government is sitting on its own assets and needs merely to cash in by doing what any rational entity in the economy does – negotiate the best deal. Then with this profit, rather than fund more waste, pay the stakeholders, we citizenry, a dividend. Thereby geonomics gets rid of two huge problems. It replaces taxes with full-value fees and replaces subsidies for special interests with a Citizens Dividend for people in general. Neither left nor right, this reform is what both nature lovers and liberty lovers need to promote, right now.

Get Involved

Thoughts for the Day

One should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

George Bernard Shaw

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.

Raymond Lindquist

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

Norman Cousins

No one knows enough to be a pessimist.

Wayne Dyer

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Thomas Jefferson

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.